Coming Full Circle: Viva la Vida

I had a really hard time choosing the name of my blog.

I think my first blog's name was something like My Amazing Adventures or something. That ended as I quickly realized I didn't have THAT many adventures and none of them were particularly amazing. So the title changed to Snoopy's Musings. That one stuck for quite some time. I like Snoopy, quite a bit actually, and "musings" fit the content of most of my posts pretty well. However, the time came to close the blog and start fresh, which I did. This time I called my blog Inside Out. I thought it was a nice metaphor for all my inside thoughts going outside, but most everyone else just didn't get it. My URL is even SnoopyInsideOut. I had high hopes for that title, but it didn't even last a month.

Sometime right around this blog-naming crisis, Coldplay released a new song that flooded the airwaves every fifteen minutes. Jon Schmidt even did a mix of it with Taylor Swift's hit Love Story, and that was how I truly fell in love with the song - titled Viva la Vida. I don't even know most of the words to the song, but the music and the feeling struck me somehow. I started thinking about "Viva la Vida" and what that might mean. Somehow the music and my musings on the phrase wound themselves into a framework for my life, how I wanted to approach it, how I wanted to live it, how I wanted to feel about it. They spun together a feeling of empowerment, of courage and bravery, mingled with a taste for adventure and a freedom to "live the life" that I truly wanted to live, unrestricted by personal fears or others' opinions. With not a little apprehension, I titled my blog Viva la Vida, as a personal reminder that I have determined to live my life deliberately, with purpose, boldly, bravely, and freely.

Since then, a lot of epiphanies have published themselves on Viva la Vida, and the name stuck. The blog lives up to its name in most respects - as an open space for me to share my success and failure at living the life. Great successes and epic failures have shared themselves on Viva la Vida. More successes than failures, granted, and I think the spirit of the phrase permeates my thoughts and decisions more than gets admitted on the blog - which, I suppose, should be deemed a success.

Now, however, is the time to admit a failure. Viva la Vida has a weakness - a kryptonite of sorts - and it's called change. It's easy to be bold and brave and adventurous in the things you do all the time. It's not so easy when your life is all different and you're faced with big changes that you don't know how to approach. Sadly, Viva la Vida has shrunk in fear at the sight of big words like GRADUATION and CAREER and even MARRIAGE to a small extent. Suddenly freedom is restricted by fear and faith is dissipating in a poof of Viva la Vida-colored dust. All at once the things that are familiar and comfortable and easy for me are drawing to a close, and I'm on a boat sailing toward a cliff that's the edge of college and the comfortably familiar life that envelops it, and I don't have any idea what to do when that bubble pops. And it's big and scary and I don't really feel bold or empowered or brave at all.

But.

Then, one day, I had an epiphany. Maybe it was today, but that's beside the point.


Viva la Vida is my personal way of making myself be strong. Viva la Vida is all about me, doing big things and accomplishing goals and being awesome all on my own. And therein lies Viva la Vida's weakness. I can't do it all on my own, and so Viva la Vida was doomed to fail from the very beginning.

Fortunately, I have help. Friends. Family. A sweet, supportive husband. And most of all, a Father in Heaven who can see what's going to happen when the bubble pops. Who is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and loves more perfectly than anyone else. Who cares deeply about me and my success, and who can help bring me closer to perfection than Viva la Vida ever could.

This quote is not by God, obviously, but it's by another of my favorite characters, and it reminds me always that I'm not alone:

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together...there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, I'll always be with you. - Winnie the Pooh.

So. Viva la Vida. Viva la Vida today, tomorrow, and always, even in the face of big, scary things - because Viva la Vida is powered by a source much stronger than my own will and determination. I walk in the footsteps of one who is much better, much smarter, and much more perfect than I, and He will never leave me to walk alone.

Viva la Vida.